By Hong Xinyi

SEVERAL friends have been going through a bit of soul-searching recently with regard to their jobs, or lack thereof.

One has decided to set up shop for herself after years of labouring in the corporate trenches.

'Might as well do it now, when the benefits from a steady job aren't that good anyway.'

Two have been in graduate school for as long as I have been pulling in a monthly pay cheque, and now find themselves trawling the shell-shocked American job market for dwindling prospects.

Another is pondering whether to return to the workforce full-time after leaving to take care of her young child, as a hedge against a worsening recession.

She had a heart-to-heart conversation about this with her three-year-old recently, and both came to the conclusion that Mummy should stay at home - for now.

Yet another friend has gone part-time at the insurance company where she works, now that it is tougher than ever to persuade skittish folk to sign up for policies.

'Maybe I should just help my husband with his business,' she said over coffee one day, weighing the benefits of being a towkay neo (Hokkien for boss' wife) against the security of being a self-sufficient woman.

It is hardly surprising that one's job has become something to mull over with increasing intensity in the current economic climate.

The United Nations-affiliated International Labour Office estimated earlier this month that the global unemployment rate could reach between 6.3 per cent and 7.1 per cent, resulting in an increase of between 24 million and 52 million people unemployed worldwide.

Last week, the Business Times reported that financial research group Macquarie Research 'expects Singapore's overall unemployment rate to peak at 6 to 7 per cent later this year.

This is worse than during the electronics bust of 2001, when, on a seasonally adjusted basis, the overall unemployment rate rose to 3.6 per cent'.

With a secure job becoming a rarer thing for many, it has become a correspondingly more valuable asset, reckons Time magazine.

Time columnist Nancy Gibbs wrote last month: 'A job, like a marriage, has its honeymoon phase, its strengths and strains and things that make us crazy.

'But now as all our emotions are rewired, we are grateful for what we once just assumed and frightened of things we once ignored...

'More and more often, I hear people talk about their jobs in a new way: 'You have to renew your vows,' as one friend puts it.'

That is not the whole story, though. In a feature this month titled 10 Ideas Changing The World Right Now, Time ranked a renewed respect for jobs at No. 1, but also noted: 'If, as a society, we turn our attention back to work - if we dote on our jobs as much as we did on our homes and portfolios in an earlier era - then we'll have to start asking deeper questions about why we do what we do.

'It reframes the whole issue of, What type of work am I willing to do?'

In a talk he gave in Singapore last October, Monocle editor Tyler Brule made a similar prediction.

The recession, he said, will likely lead to 'hundreds of thousands rethinking their lives and careers and locations. Where will they go? I believe there may be a global scramble to attract talent'.

The countries that will be successful in drawing those who want to head in a new direction, jobs-wise, will be ones that focus on fostering environments conducive to creativity and diversity, he believed.

People will be drawn to places that are designed to 'create an everyday sense of wonder', where communities feel secure and yet still free to experiment.

'The world's greatest capitals work because they are full of surprises,' as he put it.

So, there is apparently hay to be made from the current economic disarray, for governments with enough foresight and resources to envision what the world and their own particular backyard should ideally look like when things recover.

In the midst of turmoil lies the potential for metamorphosis: Will the United States, for instance, remember to relax its increasingly unfriendly borders to job-seeking, business-creating immigrants in the process of rescuing domestic financial titans?

Will China's suddenly embattled middle class emerge from their falling real estate prices and battered stock portfolios with a rash of new entrepreneurs?

For most of us, the possibility of change is considered on a personal rather than a social or national level.

I realise, of course, that many cannot afford the luxury - because it is a luxury - of thinking about how their jobs align with their sense of purpose and identity, when simply being able to survive and support one's family is already a daunting prospect for many.

But for those who are in a position to do so, like some of my friends, the question of why you do what you do and whether to keep doing it has taken on a whole new existential cast.

A long time ago, I asked a playwright why he chose to go into his particular line of work.

His answer was exceedingly simple: 'I love theatre. I used to act even though I was bad at it because I wanted to be around people who did theatre. If I hadn't become a playwright, I would be happy to clean up after shows or sell tickets.'

And then, a few weeks ago, a colleague and I hitched a ride back to the office with a newsmaker.

It was pouring heavily after several blazingly hot, dry weeks and the Photodesk was asking for photographers to send in pictures of rain to go with a story on the weather.

This very dedicated colleague kept his camera aimed out of the car window the whole way back, on the off chance that a rainbow might appear towards the tail end of the storm.

'Rain plus rainbow will definitely trump pictures of just rain,' he explained.

I suspect that neither of these two will have problems renewing their vows with their jobs, even when times are bad and wages and bonuses and what-have-you take a hit.

And shorn of the distractions of monetary perks and glorious prospects, maybe that is what many are now looking for: How to recharge that sense of wonder about what they do.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.